


Wind in Your Eyes

by la_dissonance



Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-09
Updated: 2010-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-21 20:35:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_dissonance/pseuds/la_dissonance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This takes place in some sort of bizarre in-between world where Brendon's life is AU and Jon's isn't, idek. They are just regular people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wind in Your Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted February 2010 [here](http://la-dissonance.dreamwidth.org/92483.html).

Windy April days in Chicago always came with a certain measure of ambient grit. It blew up from the ground, street sand laid down during snowy weather and stirred up in eddies by car tires. Brendon's eyes felt gritty, coated with a thin film of the stuff. Bicycles technically weren't allowed on this section of the divided highway, but Brendon's hot water hadn't come on for the _longest time_ this morning and he was was late and it was fully two miles longer to get to the university via the legal, bike-approved route.

Besides, biking on the highway was totally safe as long as you were able to get into the wide left-hand shoulder. By the time you got to the university, it wasn't even a highway anymore, just a wide road with a grass strip down the middle.

The thing was, Brendon had to squint if he didn't want to be instantly blinded by flying sand, and squinting doesn't do much for your peripheral vision. So far Brendon had spent the entire ride a) hoping that he didn't get run over by a rogue merging car and b) wishing he had thought to wear his glasses today, which probably could have cut down on the flying debris a little, even though they might have gotten destroyed in the process. Really, not a great day for visibility any way you cut it.

If he hadn't been squinting hard enough to nearly hurt, Brendon _might_ have seen the bus coming up alongside him, but as it was, he wasn't aware of it until a voice from left shouted "Hey, watch out!"

Surprised, Brendon looked to his left, swerving a little on the sandy pavement, and saw a guy frantically pointing at Brendon. He looked over his other shoulder, narrowly avoiding swerving again, and oh shit, since when had there been a bus _right there_? There was nowhere to go; Brendon couldn't outpace the bus and he couldn't ride up over the curb, it was too high. Brendon's adrenaline-soaked brain tried to do both of these things at once anyway, and the next thing he knew his bike tires were skidding against the curb and he was about to go over the handlebars...

A pair of strong arms gripped him around the waist and wrenched him off the careening bike. The bus passed with a belated blare of its horn, and Brendon collapsed on the grass of the median in a shaky puddle.

"Shit," he said. His knees felt like they had been turned into water, and he was pretty sure his ankle was bleeding from its collision with the curb. One of the wheels on his bike was still spinning, and the whole thing looked pretty bent up. "Shit," he said again.

"Yeah," a voice agreed from somewhere above him.

Oh, right. There was another person here. Brendon turned and caught sight of a guy in a white hoodie standing just behind him, a rueful smile on his face. He scrambled to his feet.

"Hey, you probably shouldn't worry about standing up just yet," white hoodie guy said, grabbing Brendon's arm just as his knees gave out again.

Brendon sat back down again, his face flaming. This whole thing was making him look stupider and stupider - who couldn't even manage to stand up, honestly?

"Are you okay?" The voice was coming from down by Brendon's level this time, and he hazarded a glance up. White hoodie guy was sitting cross legged on the grass in front of Brendon, genuine concern written across his face.

"Shit! You're the guy from the Starbucks," Brendon blurted out. A moment later his brain caught up with his mouth and he clamped his hands over his mouth.

"Yeah, that's me. My name's Jon," he added.

Brendon already knew this from having seen it on his nametag basically every day. It was that nametag's fault that he and Jon had never had a real conversation. Jon was easily the cutest barista in the store - possibly the whole chain - and Brendon had entertained fantasies of striking up conversation on any number of topics, all of which would lead to Jon realizing how awesome Brendon secretly was under his dorky veneer. And then they would go out on awesome dates, and have tons of awesome sex, which Brendon had very carefully avoided imagining in any detail so that he wouldn't stammer and blush more than necessary while ordering his drink.

But the nametag got in the way of all this - you can't really introduce yourself when you can't even plausibly pretend you don't already know the other person's name. At least you can't do it without sounding _really_ lame, and the whole idea was for Jon to see how awesome Brendon was. If there were other, introduction-independent ways of starting a conversation, Brendon was still in the process of working out what they were.

"I'm Brendon," Brendon said, and that solved that problem. Somehow this was about a thousand times more awkward than just telling Jon his name at Starbucks would have been. "Nice to meet, I mean, uh, thanks for the..." Brendon waved his hand toward the cars passing a few feet away from where they were sitting.

"No problem, man. I feel kind of bad for distracting you in the first place, I mean, you probably would have seen it in time if I hadn't yelled."

"No, you were trying to help," Brendon said automatically, and Jon smiled. Brendon suddenly wanted to see him smile like that all the time.

"But really, are you okay?"

Brendon checked himself over. "I think so? My ankle might be a little messed up, but mostly I'm just..." He flapped his hand vaguely.

"Shaken?" Jon suggested.

"Yeah." Brendon nodded. "Exactly. And it's not even like it was unexpected, really - if there was going to be a day where it would happen, this would be it, with all the sand blowing around and... And cars move fast, obviously, and drivers can be really stupid, so you're always picturing how easily it might happen. Well, I don't mean _you_ , that's a really weird thing to imagine, cars running you over. I'm just strange and morbid like that, I guess," Brendon backpedaled, but Jon was already nodding along.

"Yeah, sure, of course you do. _I_ do. Probably everyone does that. What else are you supposed to think? There are all these giant things everywhere that could smash you into mush if you were standing just two feet out from the edge of the sidewalk."

"But you're not," Brendon said. He realized distractedly that he was plucking blades of grass with the hand he didn't have curled around his knees, and that the ground was getting kind of bare in that spot. He shifted his weight and started plucking the grass that he had been sitting on. "You never are standing two feet away from the sidewalk. You just can't help thinking what if. Does that sound really weird, coming from a guy like me?"

Jon smiled again. "No, man, I bet everyone does that. But I guess it depends on what type of guy you are. Some people think about morbid shit all the time."

Brendon felt his face heating up again, but not from embarrassment this time. Or maybe just a different type of embarrassment. "Are you asking me what kind of guy I am? Because I don't even know how I'd begin to, like. Um."

"Yeah," Jon said, his smile easy. At some point in the conversation they had made eye contact, and Brendon probably should look away before it got awkward, but Jon had really pretty eyes. His eyelashes, in particular, and the way the corners wrinkled up in tiny lines when he was smiling.

"Um," Brendon started, massacring the grass faster than ever. "Obviously the kind of guy who takes stupid shortcuts when he's late for class, and gets run over by rogue buses as a result -"

" _Almost_ run over," Jon interjected.

"Almost run over, yeah. Still scary. And also the kind who'll go to Starbucks and get the really sugary lattes nearly every day even though my roommate yells at me for it, because they make me even more hyper-hyper than usual. Did you know that in French they use hyper as a prefix the same way we use super? I'm taking French 101 this semester, it's my second-to-last gen ed requirement."

"Hyper-hyper," Jon said, putting a French accent on the first 'hyper'. "Hah. It makes sense. Stop pulling up the grass though dude - what did it ever do to you?"

"Oh, uh." Brendon glanced down at his grass-destroying hand, and stilled it with conscious effort. He tucked it under ass to keep it out of the way. "Sorry."

"It's cool, I just figured we should leave some grass for the other people."

"Right, for all the hordes of other people who stroll around enjoying the highway median every day." Brendon rolled his eyes, but Jon was grinning as if he'd just told a hilarious joke, and Brendon couldn't help smiling too.

"Go back to the part about making unwise decisions at Starbucks," Jon said, hypocritically picking a blade of grass from the ground in front of him. He stuffed his hands in his hoodie pockets and grinned up at Brendon.

Brendon made an undignified snort-huffle sound. "Unwise Starbucks decisions, dude, I am _made_ for those. Like not talking to awesome baristas who are awesome, I'm very good at that."

"Awesome baristas? Plural? Like who?"

Brendon got the sudden urge to throw a clod of dirt at Jon's head, or something, but he stifled it. "Like _you_ , dumbwad. You're obviously really awesome." _And really cute,_ his brain supplied, but he was no longer so hyped up on adrenaline that the words were liable to come out of his mouth without permission.

"You totally have talked to me before, though."

Brendon raised his eyebrows incredulously. If he'd ever had a conversation with Jon, he was pretty sure he'd have remembered it.

"Stuff like 'Can I have a grande soy cinnamon dolce latte?' And then I asked you if you wanted whipped cream on it, and you asked if we had soy whip and I had to say that sadly we didn't. That's a legit two-way conversation."

"Oh my actual god," Brendon groaned, burying his face in his hands. Not the soy whip incident. He hadn't dared to step inside the campus Starbucks for three days after that, and only then after making Spencer go in first and make sure the coast was clear. Spencer had made him order decaf with the sugar-free syrup in it, which was the second top reason why the soy whip incident should have been forgotten long ago. "This is more embarrassing than when it actually happened," Brendon said from beneath his hands. "I figured you couldn't possibly have remembered that."

"I couldn't possibly forget! Man, you should have seen your face. It was like I had just told a puppy there were no such thing as walks."

"The whipped cream is _very important_ ," Brendon countered, mostly to avoid thinking about how Jon had basically just said he thought Brendon was cute. That was not an entirely bad thing, maybe? "You can see why my vegan phase only lasted a week." At the time, Brendon had figured that once he started drinking the regular stuff, he'd lose his chance of being associated with Pathetic Soy Whip Boy in Jon's memory.

"Hey, Brendon, come on," Jon said when Brendon still hadn't uncovered his face after a minute. Brendon peeked out from between his fingers, because Jon really did sound worried. "It's really lame that we don't have soy whip, what are real vegans supposed to do? Corporate bullshit, is what that is. Jon Walker does not abide by corporate bullshit."

"Yes you do," Brendon said, but a corner of his mouth was twitching up in a smile.

"Do not," Jon said, completely earnest.

"Do too! Don't tell me you bring in a thing of actual soy whip and keep it in the fridge for when real vegans ask for it."

"Well, no." Jon ducked his head a bit. "But that's only because none of the real vegans are awesome enough to ask for it. They've already caved to the corporate bullshit. They let it shape their expectations! You, on the other hand, are a free spirit."

Brendon laughed out loud; he couldn't help himself. He was also probably staring at Jon with the most creeptastic of adoring grins, and if they kept this up one moment longer he was probably going to start shitting glitter. "I think I'm good to stand up now," he said.

"Sweet," Jon said, jumping to his feet. He held out his hand and Brendon grabbed it without thinking. He let Jon lever him up, and was tempted to overcompensate and crash into Jon, but that would be a bad idea. _This is just that cute guy from Starbucks,_ he told the clingy, grabby part of his brain. _You're not actually best friends yet._

Instead of tackling Jon to the ground Brendon dusted debris off his ass, which was very cold and mostly numb from sitting on the ground for so long. Out of the corner of his eye, Brendon caught Jon doing the same, and he had to fight down another bubbling, manic grin. The stupidest things, honestly.

"You gonna just leave your bike here?" Jon asked.

Brendon sighed and hauled it up onto the median. "I should really take it with me. Don't have tons of other bikes lying around at home, so."

"Yeah," Jon said. He bent to inspect a crooked reflector and frowned when a piece of it came off in his hand. "We can totally fix this later. I've got glue and stuff at my apartment."

"At your apartment?" Brendon's voice absolutely did not break in a high-pitched squeak around the word 'apartment', which he did not have to cover up by clearing his throat and hurriedly adding, "Do you live around here? Where were you headed? I had class all day but I probably missed most of the first one anyway..."

"Down that way," Jon said, waving his hand in the general direction of Brendon's neighborhood. I was actually on my way to work."

"Oh," said Brendon. "That's cool then, we can walk together." He kicked at the dented front wheel, mostly failing to straighten it out, and began dragging the injured machine along next to him. He checked over his shoulder once to make sure Jon was following him, and Jon grinned and jogged a couple of steps to catch up.

They walked in comfortable silence for a couple hundred feet, punctuated by Brendon's grunts as he tried to convince the bike it wanted to roll in a straight line, and keep rolling.

"Are you going to be late for work?" Brendon asked, after a while.

Jon shrugged. "I was supposed to start fifteen minutes ago. No big deal, Kara makes exceptions for drastic stuff like car accidents."

"You're not going to... call her, or anything?" Brendon ventured.

"Nah. Jon Walker doesn't take any of that corporate bullshit, right?"

Brendon laughed. "They could like, dock your free drinks though."

Jon shrugged, smiling, as if to say _Just let them try to get to me_ , and they walked along in silence for a while longer.

"Do you think it might be easier to just carry that thing?" Jon asked, after the third time they had to stop for Brendon to re-align the front wheel.

"It's kind of a big bike," Brendon said. Carrying the thing up to his and Spencer's third-floor apartment was one thing, but all the way to school? He'd rather drag it.

"No, I meant, we can do it together," Jon said, ducking in to lift the back end before Brendon had time to object.

"You really don't have to; you already pretty much saved my life and everything," Brendon mumbled.

Jon kicked his shoe. "Shut up and pick up your side; we can talk about life debts and stuff later."

It turned out to be much easier to carry the bike than drag it, even though the peddles would bang into their legs and the handlebars dug into Brendon's stomach no matter how he held the bike. Really, once they figured out that they couldn't both walk on the same side without tripping on each other's feet, it was a piece of cake.

"Oh wait, you know what?" Brendon said suddenly.

"What?"

"We can totally just call my roommate now to pick us up." When Jon gave Brendon a disbelieving and slightly indignant look, Brendon added, "He's got the really _really_ early class on Tuesdays, which is why he couldn't give me a ride there, but he's got to be out by now, and if I tell him it's an emergency -"

Spencer made a big production of saying yes, but by the time Brendon snapped his phone shut he had secured a promise that Spencer would be there in five minutes, and yes, he would be on the northbound side.

"Isn't it a really long walk from your place to the Starbucks from here?" They were sitting on the grass again, waiting for Spencer to find them.

"I usually don't walk," Jon said, "But it's a kind of circuitous train route and I wasn't in the mood for that, and it's nice out." He shrugged. "Worked out pretty well, right?"

Brendon nodded. He could feel his knees get shaky again just thinking about it. They watched the traffic coming around the curve for a while, looking for a navy blue Honda Accord.

"You know," Brendon started, swallowing past an inexplicable tightness in his throat. "We ought to hang out sometime. For real, not in the middle of a highway. It could be fun."

"Totally, we could, totally, yeah." Jon looked over at Brendon and grinned the same stupid grin that Brendon felt spreading across his own face.

"Yeah? Awesome." Brendon bumped his shoulder with Jon's, and Jon bumped back, without a second's hesitation.


End file.
